Tuesday, May 15, 2007

aminal stories, part 1 - big turtle

A man heard a faint knock on his front door. He opens the door and looks around, sees nothing, and closes the door to resume his activities. A few minutes later...another round of faint knocking on the door. The man goes to the door, opens it, again sees no one there, and irritatedly slams the door shut, assuming some of the neighborhood kids are messing with him. A few more minutes pass and the man once more hears the now infuriating quiet knocking on his front door. He gets up, stomps to the front door and flings it open. Seething and glaring in all directions, he again sees no one there. Just before he starts to yell at whomever has chosen to prank him, he happens to look down and sees a small turtle peering up at him. "You've got to be kidding me..." the man says, disgustedly. The man angrily grabs the turtle and hurls him across the street into the open field from which it presumably came.Two years pass until one day when the man again hears a faint knocking at his front door. He opens the door and scans his eyes in all directions, seeing no one around. Until he decides to look down. Flabbergasted, the man looks down to see the little turtle peering up at him once more. Before the man could react, though, the turtle blurts out, "Hey! What the fuck was that all about?!?"

Although I botched it pretty badly, the above was one of my favorite jokes years ago. In the original joke, though, the persistant critter was a snail - which does make a bit more sense. But I couldn't help remembering the joke when we had quite an eventful...um, event late one afternoon last week.

Somehow, and I'm still at a loss to figure it out, a pretty decent sized (for an urban area, I would imagine) turtle found itself sitting in the middle of our parking lot. This was especially frightening because, a) the turtle was in no hurry to get anywhere (a common characteristic of turtles, as you well know) and, b) our parking lot at work is no ordinary parking lot - there's a fairly steady stream of eighteen-wheelers chugging through to pick up or drop of their cargo at our warehouse. Not the best place for any creature to be making itself comfortable, particularly one not known for its fleetness of foot.

Being the Office Animal Guy, I was summoned and went outside to move the turtle. After getting a few snapshots for the sake of posterity - these events don't happen all the time, you know - I picked the little guy (or gal) up and carried it over to the somewhat wooded sewer/creek that runs between the two buildings I work at, as that was the only place any of us could imagine he (or she) might have traveled from. And while I was pleased to be getting said turtle out of harm's way - at least in the parking lot - I couldn't help but be a little sad for it. I mean, that turtle most likely busted its ass for weeks climbing up the small hill above the creek to get to our parking lot. Perhaps that parking lot was some sort of Promised Land for the turtle...you never know. And here I was like some asshole club bouncer running the turtle right back to where it came from. I'm sure the turtle was cursing me in its little turtle head..."No! You big dumb fuck...why are you doing this to me?!?"

But it was for the best, obviously. And that day, briefly, I was Danny...Turtle Rescuer.